The Ritual

came after.
    Up above his head all was quiet again, but he imagined that whoever was up there was now listening to his thoughts.
    Luke lay back. The bed stank like a farm animal, but at least it was warm.

FIFTY-SIX
    He stood at the window. The sky was white with moon. It filled the atmosphere like a planet about to bump into the earth. Stretching away forever before the house, the forest
of so many tall black trees was still, but not silent. Strange cries issued in the distance, rising from down amongst the cold lightless spaces, beneath the canopy of great branches, that were like
muscular arms raised to the luminous air in praise. Dark leaves upon the peaks of the tallest trees frosted in the falling brightness. Wondrous light, but not comforting light. Though he wished it
were.
    Behind him in the room, someone spoke to him in a tiny quick voice. A little person. What they said made sense to him, though he had never heard such things before in his life. He was not
allowed to turn around.
    And he felt an urge to go down there, to that whitish clearing beneath his window. Carved within the great ocean of never-ending trees, in this new world, was a circular flat space, carpeted
with a soft pelt of shorn silvery grass. He felt euphoric before it, filled with a mad glee, but accepted it would be very hard to get out of the circle and the upright stones if he dared go down
there. Down there to turn round and round, before the mouth of the dark stone chamber, while looking up at the white sky. He had done it before. Or had he? He wasn’t sure.
    And in the treeline the figures cavorted. They were children. They were angels. Tears filled his eyes. They were dancing. Or they were stalking around the edge of the clearing. Or maybe their
skipping movements, before they dropped to all fours, were a combination of dancing and stalking. Sometimes they rose up on two hind legs and waved, or clawed their thin white arms at the sky.
    It was hard to see the little white people clearly, because of the sudden darting of their pale child bodies into the shadows of the forest. They never remained still for long, and flitted about
constantly. But the longer he watched the more he glimpsed of their pinkish eyes and their whippy tails, blood-purple like earth worms, before they withdrew to the endless darkness beneath the
treetops.
    Through the glass of the window he strained his ears to hear their voices too, as they called up to him. They cried out for him to come down and do the turning before the black stones, under the
white glare of sky. But then he thought the sound they made was more like barking, or coughing, and not voices calling at all. And he was uncertain whether children should have such square yellow
teeth in their wide mouths. Clutched in their tiny white fists were bones. Long bones from legs and arms.
    Then he understood that they put the bones inside the stone chamber. It was the chamber that he was to go inside, to wait for another to come. From out there. Deep and far out there, among the
forever of black trees, something approached.
    Behind him, the tiny voice and the skitter of tiny fast feet on the wooden floor stopped.
    And, suddenly, he was inside the stone walls of the old chamber of upright stones and he could smell the earthy pungency of the dirt floor inside it. And in the thin light he saw the bones. All
of the bones. The bones strewn about the dirt floor. Some still wet and dark. Bones gathered amongst the stones.
    He pitched from sleep and cried, ‘Not in there. Not inside. Please.’
    But the three figures about the bed all reached for him at the same time. Ashen faces cracked with black fissures, came in at him.
    Fenris grinned. The whites of his eyes were incongruous and shocking within their black sockets. ‘We have found your friend. Come and see, Luke.’ His mouth was too red beyond the
black lipstick, the tongue too visible, the teeth too yellow.
    In his giant hands, Loki slapped Luke’s forearms together. Luke tried to pull his hands apart, but Surtr worked faster with the nylon hoop. It must have been circling his wrists before he
awoke, and now a strap was tugged and the loop whizzed smaller. His flesh purpled under the binding. The skin immediately itched.
    He was pulled into a sitting position. Fenris yanked the eiderdown off his legs. Cold air rushed in and his body seemed frail, ungainly. Shame warmed through Luke.
    ‘Up. Up,’ Loki said.
    Fenris smiled at him. ‘Man,